Gentle reader,
One year ago, we were freaking out. The winds were coming, it was dry as hell, and our shared psychic tuning fork was vibrating in nervous fits and starts.
Something seemed really wrong. Did you feel it, too?
The video at the top of this newsletter would have gone out soon after we shot it, but as we wrote after Pacific Palisades and Altadena were destroyed, it felt unseemly to share it then.
Still, we made it for your benefit, and as Steven Lamb asks in this piece about the Rose Parade float protest, if not now, when?
In Eaton Canyon above Altadena, community climatologist Edgar McGregor was pacing the trails, documenting dense, dry brush and monitoring the weather forecast. Alarmed, he began to craft the careful messages he’d send to the thousands of members of his Facebook group Altadena Weather And Climate: be prepared, pack your essentials, don’t go to sleep, get ready to GO!
The weird feeling was weighing on us, and we planned to hunker down at home. But then we saw the Citizen app alert about the second fire in one week in a vacant historic building at Hope and Pico—two doors from the Morrison Hotel.
Despite local, national and international news headlines claiming the famous site of the Doors album cover shoot had been destroyed, we found it scorched but still standing (and salvaged some beautiful bronze facade details from the sooty sidewalk).
So we went out to see if the Carter Automobile Works (Dodd and Richards, 1918), an early repair and manufacturing site for fenders and other sheet metal parts on L.A.’s original (and endangered) Auto Row, had survived, too.
We’d been worried about Carter Automobile Works after the Morrison Hotel fire, because a door on the alley side was unsecured. When we peeped through the missing door knob hole, we captured this Lynchian scene of a trespasser and ravaged stuffed animal illuminated by the late December sun.
The former T-shirt wholesale warehouse had sold for $20 Million in 2018, and like much of the block had been sitting vacant for years as Relevant Group attempted to navigate its various financial, permitting, legal and congressional investigation crises so they, or someone else, could redevelop the block.
So off we went, to see what was left. The winds the National Weather Service had warned about sent these flags whipping in Pico Union.
On Hope Street, we found Carter Automobile Works still standing—and a Relevant Group employee, walking the wet and ashy sidewalk with the fire captain who had extinguished the blaze.
Under normal circumstances, we’re respectful of private conversations. But this conversation about the fire aftermath was happening on a public sidewalk, and it concerned emergency response done in the public interest at public expense.
And so we filmed, and then we gave the Relevant Group employee a pretty serious tongue lashing.
For context on why we were so upset: in May 2022, former Los Angeles City Planning Director and then Relevant Group representative Michael LoGrande had invited us to tour the ground floor of the Morrison Hotel to show off the missing walls, ceilings and floors, the result of a lockdown-era, unpermitted gutting that was intended to render the 1914 building, designed by master architects Morgan, Walls & Morgan, ineligible to be landmarked.
This meeting was disturbing, especially after the Morrison changed hands and later burned, the wooden frame going up like kindling. This distress had festered into the righteous rage and sorrow that flared up on seeing Relevant Group’s rep casually scoping out the wreckage of another fine, empty building his company wanted to demolish. (RIP Piano Bar in Hollywood, torn down for nothing.)
People who lost homes and businesses in Pacific Palisades reasonably want to know where the City’s fire trucks and crews were before and during the fire.
Some of these first responders were busy on January 7th on Hope Street, listening to us rage about good buildings, held vacant, left open to burn.
23 miles away, sparks from the week-old Lachman Fire flared up and began to spread into Pacific Palisades and Malibu. No City, County or State Parks crew was posted there to fight the fire, despite the dangerous wind warnings.
And so began a year of unimaginable pain and reckoning, of personal loss and brave activism, and the mounting recognition that nobody is coming to save us, so we have to save ourselves.
But before that, Edgar McGregor wrote his message telling Altadena to be ready, then hit post. Group members fired up phone trees and pounded on doors. Lives were saved.
Edgar, who was not paid to do the work he did so well, is second guessing himself. That’s what it is to be devoted to your community, to be kept up nights worrying, willing to do whatever it takes to be of service and look after others.
Imagine if the Edgar McGregors of greater Los Angeles had access to the tools and resources our so-called leaders have squandered. If anything comes from the horrors of the conflagrations, it should be a new sort of collective public safety and stewardship, with citizens at the table in times of peace and in peril.
Tomorrow and in the days that follow, there will be memorials, protests and gatherings of tribes. All who feel called are welcome to join the community in person in Pacific Palisades and Altadena.
As we prepared to publish this unusually dramatic and antagonistic slice of our preservation advocacy, we went back to Hope Street to see how the burned out shell of the Carter Automobile Works had fared.
A large production was set up on the block, and when we told a resting crew member how refreshing it was to see, he grinned and said he felt 2026 was going to be a better year.
And he was right! For down the alley, where the door had been left unlatched for vandals last December 31, we found metal panels installed flush to the brick. Through a crack at the top, the scorched roof beams framed a beautiful blue sky.
The fact is, it’s not hard to secure a vacant building: you simply have to think it through and spend some money.
In November, we suggested that metal doors and shutters could be used to protect the Hollywood Center Motel, to no avail. The unsecured El Nido residence, full of homeless squatters, suffered a terrible fire on Sunday morning, then was demolished by LAFD’s heavy equipment division.
Last night, we spoke with Matthew Seedorff of Fox 11 News about the loss of El Nido, the many derelict buildings in the neighborhood and the need to support Hollywood Heritage in their efforts to see the compound landmarked.
You can learn more about Hollywood Center Motel’s amazing history, efforts to preserve and keep it safe, and what might happen now that the Cultural Heritage Commissioners will be touring a partly destroyed property by tuning in live on Wednesday at 7pm to the free online program The Hollywood Center Motel: A Case for Preservation.
Tomorrow is a heavy anniversary for Angelenos, and we think it will ease the ache to spend some of it with preservation pals, lamenting the loss of a great early Hollywood house, and charting a path forward for better stewardship by property owners and the City to save places that matter. Join us, do!
Yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
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Our work—leading tours and historic preservation and cultural landmark advocacy—is about building a bridge between Los Angeles’ past and its future, and not allowing the corrupt, greedy, inept and misguided players who hold present power to destroy the city’s soul and body. If you’d like to support our efforts to be the voice of places worth preserving, we have a tip jar, vintage Los Angeles webinars available to stream, in-person tours and a souvenir shop you can browse in. We’ve also got recommended reading bookshelves on Amazon and the Bookshop indie bookstore site. And did you know we offer private versions of our walking tours for groups big or small? Or just share this link with other people who care.
UPCOMING WALKING TOURS
• Know Your Downtown LA: Bradbury Building, Basements of Yore and the Dutch Chocolate Shop (1/17 - sorry, sold out) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (1/24) • Alvarado Terrace & South Bonnie Brae Tract (1/31) • Hollywood Noir (2/7) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (2/14) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown L.A. (2/21) • Weird West Adams & Elmer McCurdy Museum Visit (2/28) • Film Noir / Real Noir (3/7) • Bunker Hill, Dead and Alive (3/21) • Christine Sterling & Leo Politi: Angels of Los Angeles (4/4) • John Fante’s Downtown L.A. (4/11) • Early Hollywood’s Silent Comedy Legends (4/18) • Downtown Los Angeles is for Book Lovers (4/25)
